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Gothica Bononiensia 23 Jul 2013 | 12:20 am
Professors Rosa Bianca Finazzi and Paola Tornaghi of The Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan have published[1] a magnificent analysis of a recently discovered 6th-century palimpsest of two f...
Weather Station Kurt 25 Mar 2013 | 04:04 am
Weather Station "Kurt", officially WFL-26 (Wetter-Funkgerät Land-26) was an automated weather station installed in Northern Laborador on October 22, 1943, by a team from the German submarine U-537. It...
The Phallus Tree of fr. 25526 17 Mar 2013 | 09:52 pm
The Bibliothèque nationale de France houses a particularly strange manuscript of Guillaume de Lorris' and Juen de Meun's Roman de la Rose: BNF fr. 25526. It is famous for its extensive bas-de-page ima...
Massachusetts, 1810 3 Feb 2013 | 12:48 am
A map showing the population distribution of Massachusetts based on the 1810 Federal census. It shows how remarkably and evenly distributed people were across the entire breadth of the state prior to ...
More on "Twitter" 5 Nov 2012 | 11:37 pm
Notker Labeo (c950 - 1022) used the Old High German cognate of "twitter" for the Latin "susurrare" in exactly the same place as Chaucer in this own translation of Boethius in the early 11th century. T...
Chaucer and "Twitter" 30 Oct 2012 | 03:48 am
The Atlantic Magazine recently mentioned a tweet from the Oxford English Dictionary noting that Geoffrey Chaucer has the earliest attested use of the word "twitter". It comes from his translation of B...
S0-102 21 Oct 2012 | 02:36 am
Scientists at the University of California recently announced the discovery of a star with the shortest known period orbiting around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way (Sagittarius A*) at o...
David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon and the Brockengespenst 30 Jul 2012 | 05:25 am
There is an incident in David Foster Wallace's "Infinity Jest" (1991) that is a direct reference to Thomas Pychon's "Gravity's Rainbow" (1973). I believe though that this is actually part of a chain o...
Asgard 18 Nov 2011 | 04:08 am
Even though I probably know better, I can't help but view the Arctic romantically. So, while some of the hooting, "extreme sport" carrying-on in this clip from The Asgard Project is a bit annoying, th...
Swell 26 Oct 2011 | 01:40 am
My friend Cory Ericson's debut novel, "Swell" is finally (!) available today. The publisher has put together a pretty comprehensive web site with all the details here. It has been receiving some grea...
